posted on Wednesday, May 02, 2007 5:46 PM
by
Lou Michels
More Alice in San Francisco
Just when I think things can't get any sillier in San Francisco (see my earlier post concerning its family leave policy, for example) a story like this comes along: it seems that the city has paid $156,000 in damages and attorney's fees to a former Director of the city's Department of Building Inspection after she sued for sexual and pregnancy harassment.
So who was the cad that would sexually harass a pregnant woman? Which part of the San Francisco city management team didn't get the memo on equal treatment and respecting senior management? It turns out that that the harassment was not even accomplished by a city employee, but by a citizen at a public hearing concerning the director's qualifications for the job.
Like many places, San Francisco requires a confirmation hearing where interested members of the public are allowed to present their objections to city appointments. At the Director's hearing, some members of the Residential Builders Association, an industry group, claimed that the Director did not have sufficient experience to replace the current director, who happened to be male. Someone reportedly said something to the effect of why are you replacing this man with "pregnancy brain?"
Notwithstanding the ugly comment, the female candidate was hired and worked in the job for several years. But she sued, claiming that city officials should have stopped the insults, and prevented the confirmation hearing from being rebroadcast on the city's cable TV channel, which she claimed was further harassment.
How the city Board of Supervisors was supposed to stop people engaged in their First Amendment rights was not explained. You would expect someone who is accepting a job in which they have to go through a confirmation hearing would know that people might say unkind things about you during the hearing. That's especially true after what happened to Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, but perhaps no one in San Francisco saw those hearings.